Personality and Subjective Well-Being: Evidence from South Korea

A few studies have examined the relationship between personality and subjective well-being using college student samples in South Korea, but they focus on personality traits (e.g., self-esteem and optimism) that are conceptually different from the “Big Five” (e.g., Cha 2003).

The codebooks and cumulative data of the 2003–2009 KGSS are available at http://​www.​kossda.​or.​kr/​eng/​.

The response rate of 63.4% is slightly lower than that of the General Social Survey in the United States, which is usually over 70%. A comparison with the Korean Census suggests that it does not undermine the demographic representativeness of the survey.

Some of previous literature (e.g., Campbell et al. 1976) consider happiness (unlike life satisfaction) as an affective orientation. Though conceptual difference between life satisfaction and happiness clearly exists, recent studies (e.g., Lucas and Diener 2008) tend to put them in the same dimension, presumably because happiness in the survey setting is believed not to tap on affective dimension. In surveys, questions on life satisfaction and happiness lead respondents to evaluate one’s quality of life retrospectively, and the answers will be a weighted sum of reflective judgments of one’s life. In order to grasp affective orientation that happiness involves, it will be better to rely on experience sampling that allows us to track down one’s emotional experiences in daily life.

The first author translated the TIPI into Korean. We did not compare the Korean TIPI with other, longer personality batteries in Korean because it would not be particularly helpful to build construct validity of the Korea TIPI for two reasons. First, the longer batteries available in South Korea are not validated ones, which are basically translated in Korean from English, not created through a series of factor analysis of Korean adjectives from scratch. Therefore, though we know that the Korean version of the “Big Five” based on longer batteries is by and large similar to its English version, we cannot rule out the possibility that there are some noticeable differences between them, presumably due to some unobservable problems in translation (e.g., Schmitt et al. 2007). Second, even though we assume that the “Big Five” measured by longer batteries of Korean adjectives is quite reliable, it is practically impossible to add them to a face-to-face, nationally representative, survey because they are too long to be included. It may be possible to compare the TIPI with longer measures used in previous studies (e.g., Yik et al. 2002), but it will not be helpful because of some fundamental differences between convenience samples from the college student body and a nationally representative sample that covers the whole population.

For a partial list of research that has used the TIPI and its translated versions, see Samuel Gosling’s website: http://​homepage.​psy.​utexas.​edu/​homepage/​faculty/​gosling/​scales_​we.​htm (last visited on February 2, 2012).

A detailed discussion on the relationship between socio-demographic factors and subjective well-being is available at Argyle (2001) and Dolan et al. (2008).

For the reasons we stated above, we did not conduct mediation analysis to identify causal mechanism here.

In another set of models, we also consider the province-level fixed effects, to ensure that our results are not the products of some correlation between personality traits and other factors that might affect subjective well-being (e.g., province-level socio-cultural differences). The results are fairly similar to those reported here (available upon request from the authors).

In this context, it is very suggestive that the relationship between personality and political ideology does not elegantly replicate well-established findings in the US and Europe (e.g., Gerber et al. 2010; Jost et al. 2009). An exploratory analysis shows that Openness is positively associated with political liberalism, but Conscientiousness is not necessarily associated with political conservatism in South Korea.

We report the min-max effects here in order to make our interpretation straightforward. It is also easy to calculate other types of marginal effects (e.g., from mean to maximum, from the 25th percentile to the 75th percentile, etc) following the same procedure. It is also doable to report the changes in predicted probability of choosing another value in the dependent variable (e.g., 2 “dissatisfied/unhappy” instead of 4 “satisfied/happy”).

The finding that Emotional Stability has larger effect than Extraversion is also reported in previous meta-analysis (e.g., DeNeve and Cooper 1998; Steel et al. 2008). Unfortunately, we do not have any convincing answer for this. On the one hand, previous research is silent on this finding. On the other hand, theoretical pieces (e.g., Gray 1991) do not suggest that BIS (behavioral inhibition system)—linked with Emotional Stability—is more active than BAS (behavioral activation system)—linked with Extraversion. Hence, we believe this issue is a theoretically daunting task that cannot be resolved empirically, and therefore it is beyond the range and scope of this paper.